The Large Hadron Collider went live last year in September. It kicked particles for about nine days after a technical problem caused the LHC to stop. Although it was supposed to go live in April, it was delayed until September 2009 because the damages were worse than first thought. Well, the Swiss scientists want to make sure that this will not happen again therefore they decided to delay the restart of the LHC with 2-3 weeks which means that the atom smasher will go live again in October.

I remind you that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Switzerland is the biggest particle accelerator in the world and many people were afraid that this will be the end of the world. I’m not saying that the LHC will not lead to the end of the world, but if you are familiar with the matter then you know that there is a 99.99% chance NOT to destroy everything therefore you should remain calm.

Scientists at CERN added more safety measures to the Large Hadron Collider and now they are sure that this won’t happen again. The electrical fault that occurred last year doesn’t have to happen again if the researchers want to learn more about what happened at the beginning of the Universe.

During the last weekend (23-25 October) particles have once again entered the LHC after the one-year break that followed the incident of September 2008.

Friday afternoon a first beam of ions entered the LHC clockwise beam pipe through the TI2 transfer line. The beam was successfully guided through the ALICE detector until point 3 where it was dumped.

During the late evening on Friday, the first beam of protons also entered the LHC clockwise ring and travelled until point 3. In the afternoon of Saturday, protons travelled from the SPS through the TI8 transfer line and the LHCb experiment, until point 7 where they were dumped.

All settings and parameters showed a perfect functioning of the machine, which is preparing for its first circulating beam in the coming weeks.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 9, 2009) — On Tuesday evening, December 8th, thousands of physicists around the world cheered as CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) smashed together subatomic particles at the highest energies ever reached by a human-made accelerator and the giant ATLAS detector observed the products of the record-breaking reactions whizzing through its sophisticated tracking devices.

....didn't the Collider in America a while back run and create so much heat energy that the magnets began to melt? ....at least that was the "Public" story as to why it was shut down soon after start up.